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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

> People take sick days all the time for mental health

When you take a sick day, you're not supposed to say what's your issue.

I go back and forth on this; on the one hand, yes, I don't owe my team an explanation about why I'm taking STO. On the other, me making it clear that I'm taking a mental health day may encourage another engineer (possibly a more junior one) to do the same if need be: emphasizing that mental health is a facet of overall health.

The last 3 companies I’ve worked at over the last few years have all had “mental health days” in one form or another as a separate offering to sicks days. It’s very common, at least in the UK.

Sounds enlightened.

A lot of the comments here seem to use the term mental health days without irony quotes. A mental health day is not a psychological crisis. It is a plea for a timeout from the workaday grind.

I didn’t put the quotes to indicate any irony, just that they’re explicitly different to your sick days and allotted differently.

I was interviewing at a company recently and they called out that they offer 1 mental health day per month, in addition to other benefits.

Curious - is it a "use it or lose it", or can an unused MH day be carried over to the next month ?

I didn't end up getting the job there but I assume it's use it or lose it. It's basically an extra 12 days of paid holiday a year which is quite significant.

Indeed so.

That’s right, because the minute you say you’re taking it for mental health, you get managed out. I’ve personally seen it happen at one of the major food delivery startup, at one of the big social media companies and at Amazon.

The steps are the same. First they pile on more work on you, then gaslight you in believing your workload is the same as a junior employee and/or is subpar, then take you on a journey of “helping” you improve, document every small thing as a major flaw and then get you in that meeting with the HR.

This is very different than my experience at another FAANG. One of my reports was able to take a multi-week mental health leave and return without any negative impact on performance rating or career. Of course, mileage probably varies from manager to manager and org to org.

That's been closer to my experience as well. Hiring folks is hard. Hiring good folks is very hard. If you're working with someone who has demonstrated good work before, but are currently not performing due to life circumstances it's often still much more cost effective to try to work with that person to get them back on track than just firing them and moving on. Most places I've worked at would make several attempts to help an employee get back to a better place before moving to release them because they acknowledge it's faster and cheaper than replacing someone.

Most places I've been at will suffer with known weak developers for a long time because a weak developer with domain knowledge is still more productive than many new developers without it and there's always the risk the new hire will turn out to be a dud as well.

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